Red Berries, White Clouds, Blue Sky by Sandra Dallas Page A

in the bad weather. I got pneumonia.”
    Mom gasped. People at Tallgrass got pneumonia fromthe cold and the coal smoke that hung over the camp. Some had even died. She said Pop must get into bed. She turned down the blankets on Tomi’s cot. Tomi realized that it was Pop’s bed now. Mom then told Roy he must find a cot and a blanket for Tomi.
    “We will get you well, Sam. You must be well when we go home,” Mom told Pop. “The war will be over one day, and we will go back to California and start again. I’ve been thinking we should raise celery and melons with the strawberries.” She smiled at him.
    “You tell me what to do? Are you head of the family now?” Pop was angry.
    Roy and Tomi exchanged glances. Mom had done everything she could to keep the family together. If Mom hadn’t taken charge, who knew what would have happened to them. Pop should be proud of her, not angry.
    “It will be your farm,” Mom said. “And it won’t be long before you are raising the flag over it.”
    “Bah!” Pop said. “I will never raise the red, white, and blue flag again.”
    “But you have to, Pop.” Tomi didn’t like what Pop was saying. “We’re Americans. You taught us that.”
    Pop scowled. “I am not an American.”
    “You’re not Japanese anymore,” Mom told him. “The Japanese are our enemy.”
    “No, I am not Japanese either.” Pop stood up and went to the window and looked out over the camp. “What am I? I am nothing.”

1944 | CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
    A SECOND-CLASS AMERICAN

    THE wind whipped at Tomi’s legs as she hurried from her barracks to Ruth’s apartment. When she’d first seen snow two winters before, she’d rushed outside and stuck out her tongue to catch the flakes. There had been only snow flurries that day, and Tomi had complained that there’d never be enough snow to make snowballs.
    But by now, well into her third winter at Tallgrass, Tomi had seen enough snow to last for a long time—and enough cold. She didn’t care if she never saw another snowball. The winter wind whipped across the prairie that day with nothing but barbed-wire fences to stop it. Tumbleweeds pushed by the wind caught on the wire or rolled into the camp and piled up against the buildings. The wind brushed one against Tomi and scratched her hand.
    Mom had ordered boots for her from the Montgomery Ward catalogue, and they kept Tomi’s feet dry in the slush and mud. But there were the places between the tops of her boots and the bottom of her coat where the wind blew grit from the street onto her bare skin and made it sting with cold. She missed the sunny days in California.
    Tomi forgot about California now, as she ran down the street. She thought about what she would tell her friend about Pop. Tomi always went with Ruth to supper. Today, however, she would have to say she couldn’t join her friend. Pop had insisted they eat together as a family.
    “But it’s different here. Families don’t sit together in the dining hall,” Tomi had protested.
    “Our family will sit together,” Pop had said in a firm voice. “Our family has broken down since I’ve been away. I am head of the family now. I say we eat together.” He looked at Mom when he said that, and she stared down at her hands, which were folded in her lap. Tomi wondered why Pop blamed Mom for the changes he didn’t like.
    Tomi realized now that things with the Itanos had changed in many ways since they’d arrived in the camp without Pop. Mom made the decisions, and sometimes she asked Roy and Hiro and Tomi for advice. Before, Pophad made all the decisions and never consulted anybody except Mr. Lawrence. Mom, who rarely left the farm in California, now spent her time working in the camp. She taught the quilting class. She worked with other women making bandages for the war effort and clothes for war orphans. She was even vice president of the Tallgrass Red Cross. She was no longer the shy woman she had once been. Tomi and her brothers had their own